(DOWNLOAD) "Discourses and Models of Intermediality" by CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Discourses and Models of Intermediality
- Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
- Release Date : January 01, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 74 KB
Description
The use of the term "intermediality" has become widespread in the last two decades with the recognition that media do not exist disconnected from one another (see e.g., Chapple; Eicher; Prumm; Rajewsky; Wolf). In German-language scholarship where the term--Intermedialitat--has much currency, appears in 1983 by Aage A. Hansen-Love (for a bibliography of German-language works on intermediality see, e.g., Grimm), although the term "intermedia" has a longer history: it can be traced as far back as 1812 when it was used by Coleridge (see Sumich) and it has experienced a revival with the 1960s international network of artists, Fluxus. In the 1970s, however, it was the term "intertextuality" introduced by Julia Kristeva--following Mikhail Bakhtin--which attracted attention (on intertextuality, see, e.g., Broich; Hoesterey; Juvan; Pfister; Zander). Here, I do not add new definitions of intermediality; rather, I discuss the discourse about intermediality in the sense of Michel Foucault in order to locate the concept of intermediality in discursive fields as a recurring concept. Thus, I do not define intermediality but ways of talking about "intermediality" in a general context. I present four types of discourse on intermediality: 1) synthetic intermediality: a "fusion" of different media to super-media, a model with roots in the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk with political connotations, 2) formal (or transmedial) intermediality: a concept based on formal structures not "specific" to one medium but found in different media, 3) transformational intermediality: a model centered around the representation of one medium through another medium. Model 3) leads to the postulate that transformational intermediality is not located in intermediality but in processes of representation and thus transformational intermediality is the flip side of model 4) ontological intermediality: a model suggesting that media always already exist in relation to other media. Thus, model 4) suggests that there are no single media but that intermedial relations take place ubiquitously. Further, a fifth model ought to be considered, that of "virtual intermediality" including the corollary concept of the "politics of intermediality," a model I am developing and thus not ready for inclusion here (see Schroter, "Das ur-intermediale Netzwerk," "The Politics of Intermediality"). In the first discursive field--synthetic intermediality--intermediality is discussed as the process of a (sexually connoted) fusion of several media into a new medium, namely the "intermedium" that supposedly is more than the sum of its parts. For scholars who work in this field, this process is related to some of the artistic movements of the 1960s (see, e.g., Frank; Higgins; Kultermann; Yalkut). These movements reside in the tradition of Wagner and his Zurich writings, i.e., in the genealogical tradition of the artistic synthesis of a Gesamtkunstwerk. Three factors are characteristic for this model of intermediality: a) the condemnation of "monomedia" as forms of social and aesthetic alienation, b) a sharp distinction between intermedia and mixed media, and c) closely connected to the latter, a revolutionary and utopian attitude regarding the triumph over "monomedia" as a social liberation (or at least its preliminary stages) in terms of the return to "holistic types of existence." Dick Higgins--a Fluxus artist--demands of avant-garde art that it should convey "holistic mental experiences" (1). He sees this process as a form of cathartic borderline experience through which conventionalized patterns of perception and behavior of so-called "everyday life" are changed and enriched. He sees the potential of these "fusions" as particularly valid in the "new arts," pointing specifically to Fluxus: "Another characteristic of many of them is that they are intermedial, that is, they fall conceptually between established or traditional media" (15). Since this intermedial fusion is new, it is exper